Just a regular potboiler

Cast:  Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Stellan Skarsgård, Pierfrancesco Favino, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Thure Lindhardt, David Pasquesi, Cosimo Fusco
Director: Ron Howard 
Rating: ***

Dan Brown, David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman team up to script this sequel which is actually a prequel based on another of Dan Brown’s pulp-fiction thrillers. The film as such is a thrill-a-minute spectacle of predictable twists and turns in a story that is spurious, unbelievable and vacuously symbolic. More so because it’s based on insignificant (quite laughable) scientific theory and it’s inherent intrigue is juiced up by demonising religion-specific rituals.

The script is full of cranked up thrill elements, benign chases and time bound clue-spotting — all elements that produce gripping fare in unpretentious thrillers. But this film cannot be labelled unpretentious by any yardstick!

The story itself is preposterous, the plotting audacious and the sequence of events quite ludicrous. Prof Langdon (Tom Hanks) learns that the secret brotherhood called the Illuminati is planning to bomb the Vatican with anti-matter. So he jets off to the holy land, joins forces with Vittoria Vetra, an Italian scientist to embark on an action-packed hunt through sealed crypts, deserted cathedrals, catacombs and secret vaults following a 400-year-old trail of ancient symbols and cryptic clues to unravel the deadly plot.
Director Ron Howard plays to the gallery with a narrative that shamelessly milks the beautiful Vatican backdrop to shore up the mystery and the thrills.

He is unashamed of employing contrivances and coincidences and is quite vigorous with his thriller mechanics. Not much time is spent on development or exposition. There’s nothing exciting about the pace or the plot. The acting is extremely pedestrian. There’s no standout performance. Even Ewan McGregor’s Machiavelli turn as Camerlengo appears plebeian.

This film is just a regular potboiler — unexpected from the likes of Ron Howard who has far better cinematic accomplishments (A Beautiful Mind, Missing, Frost/Nixon) to speak of.